Lesson Plan Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? 7, 8, 9, 10 Click to download this five-lesson unit :
Spotlight on: Primary Source A report from Spanish California, 1776 Foreign Languages, Government and Civics Fernando de Rivera y Moncada, military commander of Alta California, wrote this letter from Mission San Gabriel. Rivera y Moncada was instrumental in the development of missions in California and was in a sometimes-contentious...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Receipt for land purchased from the Six Nations, 1769 Government and Civics This document records that the representatives of the Six Nations, who signed using totems to designate individuals and tribes, received $10,000 as payment from the Penns for land the tribes had ceded in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Phillis Wheatley’s poem on tyranny and slavery, 1772 Government and Civics, Literature, Religion and Philosophy Born in Africa, Phillis Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery as a child. She was purchased by John Wheatley of Boston in 1761. The Wheatleys soon recognized Phillis’s intelligence and taught her to read and write. She became...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Slave auction catalog from Louisiana, 1855 On March 13 and 14, 1855, the firm of J. A. Beard & May placed on the auction block 178 enslaved men, women, and children at the Banks Arcade in New Orleans, Louisiana. They were part of the estate of William M. Lambeth, who had...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Buying Frederick Douglass’s freedom, 1846 Economics After he had escaped from slavery in 1838, Frederick Douglass became a well-known orator and abolitionist. He wrote an autobiography in 1845, but because he was a runaway slave, its publication increased the chances that he would be...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Preventing labor discrimination during World War II, 1942 Economics, Government and Civics In early 1942, as men of working age enlisted in the military and war production accelerated, US industries experienced a labor shortage. President Roosevelt established the War Manpower Commission "to assure the most effective...
Spotlight on: Primary Source FDR urges NAACP support before WWII, 1940 On June 14, 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to Arthur B. Spingarn, president of the NAACP, to praise the NAACP’s fight for "increasing participation by Negroes in the benefits and responsibilities of the American democracy."...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Nominating an African American for vice president, 1880 Government and Civics Born a slave in 1841, Blanche Kelso Bruce was the first African American to be elected to a full term in the US Senate. During his term as a senator from Mississippi (1875–1881), he advocated the rights of African Americans and other...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The Battle of Horseshoe Bend and the end of the Creek War, 1814 On May 12, 1814, Tennessee settler Isaac Stephens wrote to his uncle Henry Mackey in Virginia about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. In that battle on March 27, 1814, US Army and Tennessee militia troops under General Andrew...